ClustrMaps : Java Glossary

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web page converted with today’s exchange rates into your local international currency,
e.g. Euros, US dollars, Canadian dollars, British Pounds, Indian Rupees…
CurrCon requires an up-to-date browser
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If you can’t see the prices in your local currency,
Troubleshoot. Use Firefox for best results.

Note the spelling. ClustrMaps is missing an e.
ClustrMaps is both a free and pay service to count hits and to produce cluster maps
of where in the world your visitors are coming from. It is free if you have under
2500 visitors to your site daily. (That means mean unique
visitors, not page hits.) In any case, the pay version is only
$24.00 USD
for two years. If your visitors click the ClustrMaps icon embedded on your web pages,
they can browse world maps to see where fellow visitors to your website are coming
from. The service can also be used with various blogs.

What Does It Look Like?

See the ClustrMaps icon in the bottom left of this screen, above the
CMP (Canadian Mind Products) logo. It
contains count of the number of visitors and a thumbnail version of your generated
cluster map.

What Does It Track?

Even though counter images can appear on many or all your pages, they all display
the same count, the total number of visitors to your website. If a visitor looks at
the same page 20 times in a 24
hour period, that only counts as one hit. If the visitor looks at 10 different pages in a 24 hour period, that
only counts as one hit.

There is only one count maintained, the total for the website, not one count per
page.

How Does It Work?

You embed HTML/JavaScript on all your web pages, or at least the most frequently
visited ones. It will display an image loaded from the clustermaps.com website. As a side effect of serving you the image
containing the latest count, they count hits and track where visitors came from. It
is very simple in principle, just displaying an image from their website. They get
fancy and add some JavaScript to display a different image if the server is down. Of
course it can only count visits to pages where you have embedded the image link.

They provide the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) in various
forms, but all it amounts to is fetching an image with the URL (Uniform Resource Locator)
of the site (not page) embedded in the name of the image.

The cluster maps and the count embedded in the icon are recomputed only once a
day.

ClustMap’s servers are very fast. They use a distributed cloud of servers,
so there is no detectable delay in loading your pages. They are headquartered in
Pennsylvania.

ClustrMaps has no need for cookies or spyware.

They ask that the counter image always be visible since that is how others find
out about their service.

Markup

The official version of the markup is quite bulky. What follows is my trimmer
variant. They don’t provide HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language v 5), but if you put the markup they do provide
through a validator it is easy enough to make the changes. There are two pieces.
There is no need to embed the JavaScript part in every page. You can just load it
from a common file:

Here is what the second part of the markup you embed might would look like in
HTML5 at the spot you want the image to appear.

You can test that your JavaScript error-recovery code is working by temporarily
substituting the name of a non-existent image file in your HTML5 markup.

The browser automatically puts the URL
of the page you are viewing into the header of the message it sends to clustrmaps.com in the header. When you load a page from local hard
disk, this does not happen, so ClustrMaps, in that case, does not know what page
the request came from, but does not matter. ClustrMaps tracks only cumulative
website statistics, not individual page statistics.

Gotchas

When you register, they will send you two emails. If you don’t see them,
look for them in the junk mail folder. Wait for the second one that contains your
password and a list of useful URLs (Uniform Resource Locators).

It takes several days for the service to start working after you get your
markup embedded. At first, a dummy image comes up, then a blank image. After it has
accumulated some statistics to show, then the proper cluster map thumbnail
appears.

There is no mechanism to stop a malicious person from putting my markup on his
webpages to screw up my counts. ClustrMaps support have had no trouble of this
sort. They said they would check the headers to make sure requests were really
coming from my server if there is ever trouble.

Obviously, when you sign up, the counter is 0. It has
no way of going back in time to collect old hit data. It will be periodically reset
to 0, so your maps will reflect recent traffic. If they
did not do that, your maps would be solid red with visitors, making no distinction
about which geographical regions are generating the traffic. Clustrmaps is not a
proper hit counter, namely one that tracks hits since day 1. It tracks recent hits
only incidentally to buildings its cluster maps.

Outstanding Questions

If people view a page loading from local hard disk, will this count as a hit? It
will load the image, but there will be no referrer in the header, so ClustrMaps knows
it is locally loaded.

If you live in a remote part of the world and you use the The Replicator, then you could download a
mirror of this website and click a page and then click the ClustrMaps icon to see
if it registered you as a recent hit. That would settle the question.